OMEN X by HP- AP047TX: Review

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HP has been doing quite well with the Omen series of laptops and desktops which have been mainly targeting the budding gaming demographic in India while also introducing people to the wonders of PC gaming. We’ve finally gotten our hands on one of those beautiful beast’s and we’ve been in awe ever since then. The Omen X by HP is in actuality a beast, boasting a GTX 1080, 32GB of DDR4 2800Mhz RAM and an i7-7820HK with 4 cores and 8 threads that boosts up to 3.9Ghz.

This beautiful yet bulky laptop comes in at around 4.5kg which means that portability will be hard but then again, I don’t think many people would lug around a laptop with specs this high to play while they’re traveling. It has a very aggressive design which at this point is almost like a trademark Omen design that looks and feels very premium which I quite like. Especially since there’s a lot of lights with a lot of lighting options. HP knows that gamers love their RGB and they’ve delivered in spades in this department. The keyboard is a full 104 keys mechanical keyboard with complete RGB lighting which adds a lot to the overall aesthetic of the laptop. The keys were enjoyable to use but it took me a while to get used to it since the keys on these seemed to have a shorter actuation point and travel distance and the keys themselves are not as raised like most mechanical keyboards. They’ve cleverly used the space at the back of the laptop to put most of their ports there which means that you won’t get cluttered with wires near your hands or even see cluttered wires in your field of view because they’re all going to be at the back.

The ports are aplenty on this laptop and are well placed. There’s one USB 3.1 port on the left along with headphone-mic combo jack and a mic jack only. There’s one USB 3.1 port along with a multi-format SD media card reader. The rest of the ports at the back include a USB 3.1 port, one Mini DisplayPort, one HDMI, one RJ-45, and two Thunderbolt™ 3 ports.

The screen is an LED IPS Panel with a resolution of 1920×1080 and a refresh rate that is advertised to be 144Hz, however I was only able to get the refresh rate to go up to a maximum of 120Hz. The display also has G-Sync which means that playing games on this display felt buttery smooth in addition to the high refresh rate and games felt life-like due to the colours and not to mention the internal specs that allowed for those high frame rates.

Onto the benchmarks and performance and to start us off we have Cinebench R15 that scored an average of 776cb taken from 6 runs. This score is not bad but does show the importance of cores and clock speeds available in desktop components. We tested 3 games namely Rise of the Tomb Raider, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. All the benchmarks were taken with the charger connected and with Vsync off.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a gorgeous game and this system allows you to experience that beauty. On the Very High Preset, this game had an average framerate of 127.9 frames per second. This average was taken over the course of 3 runs from the benchmark provided by the game. The framerate and frametimes were smooth and were more than playable at that setting.

PlayerUnknown’s Battleground is the second game we tested that pushed the GPU to it’s limits since this game was benchmarked on the Ultra preset. The benchmark spanned 30 minutes of gameplay which had a total number of 3 games. We tested the new Sanhok map as well as the desert Miramar map. We got an average of 80 frames per second on both the maps which was extremely playable and the game only dropped frames during the initial free fall. I’ve never seen PUBG look so good and still have playable framerates so I was quite pleased with it’s performance in PUBG.

The last game tested was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The reason for this is simple, it’s an eSports title that a lot of people play and it is very CPU dependent. The better your CPU, the better your frame rate will be. The benchmarking for CSGO was done on the “Benchmark Map” that is available on the Steam Workshop. There were a total number of 3 runs that gave us an average of 240 frames per second. In this, the GPU was not being pushed to it’s limits but neither was the CPU. The CPU was being used as much as it could but it just couldn’t push past 250 frames per second. The cause of the low CPU utilization and framerate could be the incredibly high CPU temperature.

The CPU temperature when playing games was almost always above 90C. In all the three benchmarks, the temperatures reached 97-98C which is extremely high for a CPU. I suspect this caused thermal throttling but not to such an extent where the game was unplayable, however this isn’t good for the CPU in the long run and could become an issue. The GPU ran comparatively cooler running in the range of 75-85C but never really crossing 85C. The body of the laptop didn’t heat up much and gaming was comfortable on a desk. The side vent blew out hot air onto the mouse and my hand but that was mainly due to my positioning and isn’t something that most people will face.

The laptop costs ₹3,26,391 as of the time of writing this review on HP’s website which raises the question, is this laptop worth its price? It’s not very portable which means that you won’t be moving it around too much. The specs are great but the overheating that we faced could easily cause complications in the long term. However one thing remains the same, this laptop is a gorgeous piece of technology and everybody would absolutely love to get their hands on this bad boy.